Actually, both responses to the problem (stopping climate change and not stopping it) are both adaptations. We think of them differently because we are not accustomed to thinking about cultural evolution. As the cultural animals we are, we have created a cultural environment in which we live (and evolv…
Actually, both responses to the problem (stopping climate change and not stopping it) are both adaptations. We think of them differently because we are not accustomed to thinking about cultural evolution. As the cultural animals we are, we have created a cultural environment in which we live (and evolve). This cultural environment does lie inside of a natural environment, but I think the fact that H sapiens have managed to colonize just about every natural environment (we can even live in outer space!) *without* speciation is pretty good evidence that we evolve our culture to adapt to external environment changes. So, there is no doubt we will adapt, but that adaption will involve stopping climate because we like the climate the way it is and we can do it *because* we are the cultural primate.
I kinda have a polymath approach in my own substack, which discusses various aspects of our current crisis using a variety of social science tools, My own background is retired industrial scientist, Ph.D. chemical engineering. (My wife does music and knitting--I do this).
Everyone currently alive and everyone they ever knew lived in a world with an average temperature between about 1.2 degrees lower than today and today. We have experience with that sort of world and are already set up to live in it. Hence this provides a reference, we know what we had recently worked for us.
We are current manipulating the climate in order to make the temperature higher. Our current plans are to raise the temperature of the Earth to levels far beyond anything our species has experienced since the development of civilization 5000 years, and eventually, to levels our species has never encountered. We have very good reasons to believe that we cannot continue to do this without incredible cascading (negative) consequences. Prudence would suggest that we might want to carefully consider our plans to continue to proceed in this fashion. And this is what we are doing.
Yet the studies that keep coming out seem to question our influence. We had an iceage 10K years ago and a lot of cycling in and out.
Further, even a 1000 year snapshot of humanity captures the medieval warm period and the little ice age while ignoring that plant life is optimized for 1200PPM CO2 and that the earth has been much much warmer in the past.
Cascading consequences are important but it's also borders on hubristic that the reaction is to stop it. I'd recommend looking at the Younger Dryas (which I mention in the essay here) where we had incredibly volatile activity, massive temp spikes and drops, oceans rising 400+ feet and yet earth didn't have a runaway cascade of consequences.
Here's a study showing only 12% of the CO2 increase can be attributed to human activity
The first study doesn't really say anything, Since the amount of CO2 emissions in any year is small relative to the cycling of CO2, changes in the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere will depend on how much of C14-free CO2 was added and the exchange dynamics. Since the exchange dynamics are not known, one cannot back out how much C14-free CO2 was added. SO the paper is kinda meaningless.
As for the second, the effect of CO2 on plant growth is not really relevant when the issue is rising temperature and its effect on habitability.
I can't help you with your understanding of the study. it's pretty clear. I get the feeling that between this last comment and the first one that started this thread that, if you don't understand the paper, you just say 'It's meaningless, superficial, and irrelevant.'
It might be to you. But little facts, put together make bigger meaning. These are just elements of a much larger system that helps us better understand what we are dealing with.
Simplifying it into 'easy' and 'clear' is myopic and hubristic.
But that second study and the effect of CO2 on plant life is totally relevant because...well...humans eat food. The hard truth is that humans flourish under warmer temps NOT colder ones.
I don't know the right answer, but I do know that it's incredibly ignorant to suggest that we little humans will stop climate change and THAT won't have catastrophic consequences.
What do you think the paper said? Here is the conclusion that has meanng for a non-expert such as myself:
In 2018, the total content of anthropogenic fossil CO2 in the atmosphere is estimated as 3.664 E17 g, which is 23% of the total emissions of 1.59 × E18 g since 1750. Thus, in 2018, 77% of the total emissions is estimated to be present in the atmosphere’s exchange reservoirs.
This says is that the CO2 from humans gets diluted by the other CO2 in the system. I think we already know that. The carbon in the air at any time is a fraction of the total pool of carbon in the carbon cycle. Total carbon in the oceans, expressed as CO2 is 1.4 E17 kg. Using 421 ppm for CO2 in the air, the air pressure of 101.3 kPa and the Earth's surface areas of about 509 million sq kn, I get a mass of 3.4 E15 kg pf CO2. Adding them together gives 1.434 E17 kg, of which the fraction in the air is 2.4% of the total.
So, if we add a bolus of fossil CO2 into the air and let it mix in, we would eventually see 2.4% left in the air and 97.6% in the ocean. Of course, not all the ocean is in contact with the air. Deep ocean isn't available for exchange on human timescales. The 23% value obtained in the paper can give an idea of how much of the ocean has been able to exchange gases with the air. It says nothing about how much of the additional CO2 in the air came from human sources.
I literally referenced the last sentence of the abstract.
"Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming."
They also kindly have a Conclusions section at the end where they list 10 conclusions in a summarized fashion. The abstract merely consolidates that.
But at this point, I'm not sure what your argument is (or was). Should we stop climate change? Because I'm pretty sure the planet is better with warmer temps and higher CO2. That's just the evidence of science. Anything else just feels like hubris and is oddly anti-evolutionary as well as rooted primarily in economic consequences, not natural ones.
This statement " much too low to be the cause of global warming." does not follow from this result: "the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018"
The authors did not take exchange into account. They seem to assume that all the CO2 concentration increase must consist of fossil-derived CO2 for the observed increase to reflect fossil emissions.
This is simply wrong. The fossil CO2 is added onto the total inventory of carbon in the cycle, which distributes between the two phases (ocean & atmosphere), so you won't expect to find most of the increase of it in the air.
They apparently do not understand how gas exchange works. It's not that some of the fossil CO2 added to the air goes into the ocean and some is left behind. Over time, it goes into and out of the ocean. Over time the fraction of total CO2 that is NF will be equal in both phases.
Hence if the size of the ocean reservoir is large compared to the air, most of the fossil CO2 will end up in the ocean and non-fossil CO2 in the ocean displaced by fossil CO2 will end up in the air. This means most of the increase in CO2 concentration observed will be non-fossil CO2, which is what they observed.
CO2 exerts a greenhouse effect regardless of its source. The reason why the CO2 level in the atmosphere goes up is because the fossil CO2 adds to the *total* CO2 already in the air-sea system, not just that in the air.
You did a good job breaking that down. But it seems to be a bit of a nit.
You appear to confirm that only 12% of the increase of atmosphereic CO2 is human.
You appear to contest that number as a total of Air/Water but I'm not sure how you are suggesting that water held CO2 is causing global warming because it is atmosphereic CO2 that people claim is causing the greenhouse effect.
However, you still have the issue that Atmospheric CO2 is actually incredibly low from a long term perspective. Plant life did not optimize for 1200ppm if that was not optimal. Same with temperatures.
You can't go a minute looking at ancient geology and not see dramatic climate changes throughout history (as the image in the essay demonstrates)
I'm still not sure what you are advocating for. You've spent this entire time as nit picking down on a specific point and yet end up confirming it with a minor caveat.
Earlier you did confirm that the CO2 line that was created was arbitrary within human history. That assumes two things.
1. That this is optimal for humans
2. That humans are the only thing on the planet for which things should be optimized.
This goes back to my essay. I refute both of those assumptions and it returns to my conclusion. It's hubristic and anti-evolutionary.
Apparently not, because you still don't seem to understand:
You write. I'm not sure how you are suggesting that water held CO2 is causing global warming because it is atmosphereic CO2 that people claim is causing the greenhouse effect.
When you add more CO2 to the water-air system more CO2 ends up in BOTH the water and the air. The higher CO2 in the air causes the climate effects. The higher CO2 in the water causes the lower pH.
What the authors tried to do was show that the added CO2 was not from fossil fuels by analyzing C14 levels in the air, They did not look for it in the water, which is where most of it is going to be. You simply cannot say anything about the source of the increased CO2 based on the study they did. The fact that they do not realize this shows they were not competent to study this issue.
You write: However, you still have the issue that Atmospheric CO2 is actually incredibly low from a long term perspective.
Of course, it is, the sun has been getting warmer over time. Back when we had super high CO2 levels the sun was much dimmer. Had the CO2 levels been where they are today the earth would have been frozen solid. Were the CO2 to rise back to those high levels it would be too hot most current life.
You write: You can't go a minute looking at ancient geology and not see dramatic climate changes throughout history.
Yes, and those changes have causes, and can reflect things that are no longer the case like the dimmer sun of the remote past.
1. The conditions in which we are currently living are what we are adapted to (i.e. cultural-evolutionarily "optimal")
2. From the perspective of humans, human are the primary thing that matters. From the perspective of many other living organisms, the elimination of humans is optimal. So what's the point?
Your use of the term hubristic is a value judgement, which I do not share. I'm not one of these:
Being a polymath is a good thing, I am sort of one myself. But this does not excuse me from understanding the material I choose to employ. I first decided to look into global warming 17 years ago because there was so much controversy about it. I didn't note that Mars has much more CO2 in its atmosphere, yet no greenhouse effect, and jump on the skeptic bandwagon.
I took the time (about six months) to lean how it works and construct my own toy model on a spreadsheet to play with the ideas myself. I had an advantage. I'm a chemical engineer and so am already familiar with doing energy and material balances, with heat, mass, and momentum transfer, thermodynamics, etc. that are relevant to climate science.
I am on pretty firm ground in this climate stuff for a polymath, because my formal training is pretty relevant to this particular issue. However, I mostly write about social science topics where I have virtually no training and so my background is full of holes. So, I have to be careful. One of my goals in writing is to get someone with relevant background to get sufficiently interested in what I talk about so I can get a form of peer review.
Thanks for the measured response. :)
Actually, both responses to the problem (stopping climate change and not stopping it) are both adaptations. We think of them differently because we are not accustomed to thinking about cultural evolution. As the cultural animals we are, we have created a cultural environment in which we live (and evolve). This cultural environment does lie inside of a natural environment, but I think the fact that H sapiens have managed to colonize just about every natural environment (we can even live in outer space!) *without* speciation is pretty good evidence that we evolve our culture to adapt to external environment changes. So, there is no doubt we will adapt, but that adaption will involve stopping climate because we like the climate the way it is and we can do it *because* we are the cultural primate.
I kinda have a polymath approach in my own substack, which discusses various aspects of our current crisis using a variety of social science tools, My own background is retired industrial scientist, Ph.D. chemical engineering. (My wife does music and knitting--I do this).
https://mikealexander.substack.com/
There are two incredibly hubristic assumptions when people suggest we stop climate change that I tried to address in this essay.
1. That we know at what levels it is optimal to stop at.
2. That we actually can without incredible cascading consequences.
Everyone currently alive and everyone they ever knew lived in a world with an average temperature between about 1.2 degrees lower than today and today. We have experience with that sort of world and are already set up to live in it. Hence this provides a reference, we know what we had recently worked for us.
We are current manipulating the climate in order to make the temperature higher. Our current plans are to raise the temperature of the Earth to levels far beyond anything our species has experienced since the development of civilization 5000 years, and eventually, to levels our species has never encountered. We have very good reasons to believe that we cannot continue to do this without incredible cascading (negative) consequences. Prudence would suggest that we might want to carefully consider our plans to continue to proceed in this fashion. And this is what we are doing.
Yet the studies that keep coming out seem to question our influence. We had an iceage 10K years ago and a lot of cycling in and out.
Further, even a 1000 year snapshot of humanity captures the medieval warm period and the little ice age while ignoring that plant life is optimized for 1200PPM CO2 and that the earth has been much much warmer in the past.
Cascading consequences are important but it's also borders on hubristic that the reaction is to stop it. I'd recommend looking at the Younger Dryas (which I mention in the essay here) where we had incredibly volatile activity, massive temp spikes and drops, oceans rising 400+ feet and yet earth didn't have a runaway cascade of consequences.
Here's a study showing only 12% of the CO2 increase can be attributed to human activity
https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Fulltext/2022/02000/World_Atmospheric_CO2,_Its_14C_Specific_Activity,.2.aspx
Here's one showing the crop increases since 1940 are largely driven by CO2 increases
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29320
The first study doesn't really say anything, Since the amount of CO2 emissions in any year is small relative to the cycling of CO2, changes in the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere will depend on how much of C14-free CO2 was added and the exchange dynamics. Since the exchange dynamics are not known, one cannot back out how much C14-free CO2 was added. SO the paper is kinda meaningless.
As for the second, the effect of CO2 on plant growth is not really relevant when the issue is rising temperature and its effect on habitability.
I can't help you with your understanding of the study. it's pretty clear. I get the feeling that between this last comment and the first one that started this thread that, if you don't understand the paper, you just say 'It's meaningless, superficial, and irrelevant.'
It might be to you. But little facts, put together make bigger meaning. These are just elements of a much larger system that helps us better understand what we are dealing with.
Simplifying it into 'easy' and 'clear' is myopic and hubristic.
But that second study and the effect of CO2 on plant life is totally relevant because...well...humans eat food. The hard truth is that humans flourish under warmer temps NOT colder ones.
I don't know the right answer, but I do know that it's incredibly ignorant to suggest that we little humans will stop climate change and THAT won't have catastrophic consequences.
What do you think the paper said? Here is the conclusion that has meanng for a non-expert such as myself:
In 2018, the total content of anthropogenic fossil CO2 in the atmosphere is estimated as 3.664 E17 g, which is 23% of the total emissions of 1.59 × E18 g since 1750. Thus, in 2018, 77% of the total emissions is estimated to be present in the atmosphere’s exchange reservoirs.
This says is that the CO2 from humans gets diluted by the other CO2 in the system. I think we already know that. The carbon in the air at any time is a fraction of the total pool of carbon in the carbon cycle. Total carbon in the oceans, expressed as CO2 is 1.4 E17 kg. Using 421 ppm for CO2 in the air, the air pressure of 101.3 kPa and the Earth's surface areas of about 509 million sq kn, I get a mass of 3.4 E15 kg pf CO2. Adding them together gives 1.434 E17 kg, of which the fraction in the air is 2.4% of the total.
So, if we add a bolus of fossil CO2 into the air and let it mix in, we would eventually see 2.4% left in the air and 97.6% in the ocean. Of course, not all the ocean is in contact with the air. Deep ocean isn't available for exchange on human timescales. The 23% value obtained in the paper can give an idea of how much of the ocean has been able to exchange gases with the air. It says nothing about how much of the additional CO2 in the air came from human sources.
I literally referenced the last sentence of the abstract.
"Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming."
They also kindly have a Conclusions section at the end where they list 10 conclusions in a summarized fashion. The abstract merely consolidates that.
But at this point, I'm not sure what your argument is (or was). Should we stop climate change? Because I'm pretty sure the planet is better with warmer temps and higher CO2. That's just the evidence of science. Anything else just feels like hubris and is oddly anti-evolutionary as well as rooted primarily in economic consequences, not natural ones.
This statement " much too low to be the cause of global warming." does not follow from this result: "the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018"
The authors did not take exchange into account. They seem to assume that all the CO2 concentration increase must consist of fossil-derived CO2 for the observed increase to reflect fossil emissions.
This is simply wrong. The fossil CO2 is added onto the total inventory of carbon in the cycle, which distributes between the two phases (ocean & atmosphere), so you won't expect to find most of the increase of it in the air.
They apparently do not understand how gas exchange works. It's not that some of the fossil CO2 added to the air goes into the ocean and some is left behind. Over time, it goes into and out of the ocean. Over time the fraction of total CO2 that is NF will be equal in both phases.
Hence if the size of the ocean reservoir is large compared to the air, most of the fossil CO2 will end up in the ocean and non-fossil CO2 in the ocean displaced by fossil CO2 will end up in the air. This means most of the increase in CO2 concentration observed will be non-fossil CO2, which is what they observed.
CO2 exerts a greenhouse effect regardless of its source. The reason why the CO2 level in the atmosphere goes up is because the fossil CO2 adds to the *total* CO2 already in the air-sea system, not just that in the air.
You did a good job breaking that down. But it seems to be a bit of a nit.
You appear to confirm that only 12% of the increase of atmosphereic CO2 is human.
You appear to contest that number as a total of Air/Water but I'm not sure how you are suggesting that water held CO2 is causing global warming because it is atmosphereic CO2 that people claim is causing the greenhouse effect.
However, you still have the issue that Atmospheric CO2 is actually incredibly low from a long term perspective. Plant life did not optimize for 1200ppm if that was not optimal. Same with temperatures.
You can't go a minute looking at ancient geology and not see dramatic climate changes throughout history (as the image in the essay demonstrates)
I'm still not sure what you are advocating for. You've spent this entire time as nit picking down on a specific point and yet end up confirming it with a minor caveat.
Earlier you did confirm that the CO2 line that was created was arbitrary within human history. That assumes two things.
1. That this is optimal for humans
2. That humans are the only thing on the planet for which things should be optimized.
This goes back to my essay. I refute both of those assumptions and it returns to my conclusion. It's hubristic and anti-evolutionary.
You write: You did a good job breaking that down.
Apparently not, because you still don't seem to understand:
You write. I'm not sure how you are suggesting that water held CO2 is causing global warming because it is atmosphereic CO2 that people claim is causing the greenhouse effect.
When you add more CO2 to the water-air system more CO2 ends up in BOTH the water and the air. The higher CO2 in the air causes the climate effects. The higher CO2 in the water causes the lower pH.
What the authors tried to do was show that the added CO2 was not from fossil fuels by analyzing C14 levels in the air, They did not look for it in the water, which is where most of it is going to be. You simply cannot say anything about the source of the increased CO2 based on the study they did. The fact that they do not realize this shows they were not competent to study this issue.
You write: However, you still have the issue that Atmospheric CO2 is actually incredibly low from a long term perspective.
Of course, it is, the sun has been getting warmer over time. Back when we had super high CO2 levels the sun was much dimmer. Had the CO2 levels been where they are today the earth would have been frozen solid. Were the CO2 to rise back to those high levels it would be too hot most current life.
You write: You can't go a minute looking at ancient geology and not see dramatic climate changes throughout history.
Yes, and those changes have causes, and can reflect things that are no longer the case like the dimmer sun of the remote past.
1. The conditions in which we are currently living are what we are adapted to (i.e. cultural-evolutionarily "optimal")
2. From the perspective of humans, human are the primary thing that matters. From the perspective of many other living organisms, the elimination of humans is optimal. So what's the point?
Your use of the term hubristic is a value judgement, which I do not share. I'm not one of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement
************************************
Being a polymath is a good thing, I am sort of one myself. But this does not excuse me from understanding the material I choose to employ. I first decided to look into global warming 17 years ago because there was so much controversy about it. I didn't note that Mars has much more CO2 in its atmosphere, yet no greenhouse effect, and jump on the skeptic bandwagon.
I took the time (about six months) to lean how it works and construct my own toy model on a spreadsheet to play with the ideas myself. I had an advantage. I'm a chemical engineer and so am already familiar with doing energy and material balances, with heat, mass, and momentum transfer, thermodynamics, etc. that are relevant to climate science.
I am on pretty firm ground in this climate stuff for a polymath, because my formal training is pretty relevant to this particular issue. However, I mostly write about social science topics where I have virtually no training and so my background is full of holes. So, I have to be careful. One of my goals in writing is to get someone with relevant background to get sufficiently interested in what I talk about so I can get a form of peer review.